Since the wholesale massacre of children and innocent bystanders doesn’t seem to faze the NRA and all the elected officials who eagerly take their blood money, and since the NRA seems to have such deep pockets that there’s room in them for half the elected officials on capital hill, why doesn’t some high-powered big-noise law firm figure out how to file a class-action wrongful-death suit and sue the NRA, its lobbyists and all these d*ckhead lawmakers accepting their bribes for about $8 gazillion on behalf of the victims of gun violence, for medical costs, funeral and burial costs, property damages, loss of income from murdered spouses and parents, and pain and suffering?
In the meantime, you are not powerless to stem the tide of violence. Midterm elections are coming up. First and foremost, make sure you’re registered to vote, then do your homework. Examine the candidates’ voting records, and vote those featherbedding, knuckle-dragging, *sshats out of office.
The Owl Underground 
It is very difficult for me, as a Brit, to understand why this continues to be allowed to happen by the powers that be.
I do feel your anger though, at the fact that so many innocent lives are lost to gun crime, and also to, what appear to be, trigger happy police officers.
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It is difficult for other countries to understand. We are such a young country compared to Europe. We only have about 300 years of history to draw on compared to Europe. Unfortunately, all of that history, our “national mythology” and our “identitiy” as a nation is deeply entwined with guns. The Minute Men, the Old West, the Frontiersman (Daniel Boone and David Crocket), and especially the Cult of the Lost Cause. Gun violence has been with us since the birth of the nation at Jamestown and Plymouth. Worst of all, “Gun Culture” is deeply entrenched in the most conservative and least forward-thinking elements of American culture.
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Well said, girlfriend.
Amen.
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Some Brits may affect to be mystified by the ‘gun culture’ in the US but the truth is that there is plenty of shooting going on in the UK as well. And there have been the occasional ‘massacres’ with shooters killing innocent people. It’s not on the same scale here as in the US but, then, we are a much smaller nation.
The problem, it seems to me, is not with ordinary citizens owning guns but with guns in the hands of criminals and nutters. In the UK, while ordinary citizens don’t own guns, criminals and nutters seem to have little difficulty in obtaining them.
People may also forget that for a spectacular killing spree you don’t necessarily need a gun. Terrorists quite happily use bombs or drive motor vehicles into crowds of pedestrians. The death toll here is possibly as high as that in the US, once allowance made for the difference in population numbers.
Brits watching US news accounts of ‘cop shootings’ may also overlook the fact that we have had our fair share of these as well. In recent years there have been several high-profile cases of suspects being shot dead by police officers and subsequently being found to have been unarmed. When I was a child, the legend that our police are unarmed was largely true but it is no longer so. These days, police officers patrolling armed with with hand guns and automatic rifles is a common daily sight.
Yes, I agree that it would be a very good thing if Americans could be weaned off their gun-owning mania but I fear this will not happen any time soon. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the gun lobby, disasters like that in Las Vegas, far from deterring gun ownership, in fact encourage it on the illogical premise that owning a gun somehow protects you from being shot.
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I’m not affecting to be mystified. Yes, there is gun crime in the UK, but mass shootings are a rarity. I can think of Hungerford, Dunblane, and the shootings in Cumbria. Having checked, I found that there was also a mass shooting at Monkseaton. Forty six people died in those shootings, the last of which took place in 2010, and all but the Monkseaton shooting were carried out by those who held gun licences. That’s 46 deaths as a result of mass shootings in a population of 63,182,000 ( 2011 census,) from 1987 until the current date, 45 of them by people who held a gun licence.
The population of the US is approximately 326,00,000 , a little over 5 times that of the UK at the last census. It has recently been reported that in the US 1,719 people have died as a result of mass shootings since January 2013 with 6,510 injured. Source – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/02/america-mass-shootings-gun-violence.
As the daughter of a soldier who served from the 1960s until the 1980s I am all too aware of the fact that people can be killed or injured by bombs. I spent my childhood being vigilant whilst living in barracks , whilst travelling on public transport and whilst out in the numerous towns in which I lived as a result of my dad’s career choice. In addition, my younger daughter lives a stone’s throw from the Manchester Arena, heard the explosion there in May, and witnessed the resulting chaos and fear from her balcony. Worse still is the fact that the dear friend of my elder daughter’s colleague lost his life in that bombing, and she witnessed her colleague’s pain and grief.
I visit Manchester regularly, and have only ever seen police officers with guns in the days after the bombing, and in the North West city in which I live I have never seen an armed officer, despite the fact that there was an IRA bombing here in the 1980s.
Whilst there have been high profile police shootings in the UK of people who are unarmed, the figures for shootings by the police, whether the suspect was armed or unarmed, are minuscule compared to those in the US , even whilst taking the population difference into account. In 2012 , 410 people were killed by police in the US. Compare that to the fact that in the UK in 2011/12 police opened fire 5 times, with 2 fatalities, and nobody was shot dead by police in 2012/13. Source- https://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-happy-fact-check.
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You have produced an impressive set of statistics which makes interesting reading.
The statistics prove the point that I originally conceded, namely that there are more deaths through ‘gratuitous’ violence in the US than in Britain and that, as you point out and I glossed over, the numbers of deaths is higher in the US per head of population than in the UK. However, I was not seeking to suggest that the UK is equal to the US in violent killings. What I had in mind was that any complacency the British might harbour vis à vis America is misplaced because we do see mass killings here and, if we include terrorist acts in the numbers, they seem to be on the increase. In the relative absence of guns, explosives or motor vehicles driven into crowds have become the weapons of choice.
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